Banished: A Visionary Fantasy Adventure: The Chronicles of Thamon, #1

By Beca Lewis

She always looks out for number one. Will losing her powers push her into a fight for freedom?

Meg's abilities let her get away with anything. Until the spoiled shapeshifter is exiled to a dimension where magic is heresy and enchanted beings like herself are hunted and imprisoned. Worse still when night falls, she's unable to morph and left helpless against brutal raiders.

With no choice but to team up with a scrappy group of outcasts, Meg's survival depends on trusting others—even the Ordinaries. But when her newfound friends plan a daring jailbreak, she must decide if she's willing to lay her life on the line for a bunch of strangers.

Can Meg put her selfish ways behind her and become a force for good?

Banished is the first book in a spellbinding clean fantasy series. If you like determined heroines, character-driven action, and magical intrigue, then you'll love Beca Lewis's gripping tale.

Buy Banished to stop the oppression today!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Perception Publishing
• Release date: Mar 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393651598

Beca Lewis

BECA LEWIS always wanted to be a writer, but there were a few pit stops along the way. She has been a dancer, teacher, stockbroker, financial planner, club dancer (read this any way you wish), waitress, web designer, headhunter (the civilized kind), and a diamond broker to just name a few. All this while trying to be a decent mother to three kids, a step-mother to five more, and a grandmother to the five, almost grown, best-looking grandchildren in the world. All these experiences are the perfect fodder for book writing! Beca’s non-fiction Shift Series covers the system she developed and has coached for over twenty-five years. At this point, she is going to claim there is no time, so she doesn’t have to think about age. She’ll show you why you don’t have to either in this practical and inspirational series. Beca’s fiction explores stories around the concepts of other dimensions, love that transcends time and space, and where good always triumphs over evil. The best part of writing? Being an introvert on purpose, living in imagination, and then sharing it all with readers and friends.

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Copyright © 2019 Beca Lewis

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

Published by:

Perception Publishing

https://perceptionpublishing.com

This book is a work of fiction. All characters in this book are fictional. However, as a writer, I have, of course, made some of the book’s characters composites of people I have met or known.

All rights reserved.

Prologue

A sea of bodies swayed in time to the words that flowed over them. Words that made them forget about their daily lives, if only for a moment. Each word was carefully chosen as if it was a note in a symphony. Each word designed to sway hearts, minds, and ultimately control lives.

The crowd no longer cared about, or had forgotten, the meaning of the words. They were lost in the feelings. Emotions moved through them, first building them up and then letting them down in perfect timing.

They were one organism with one goal, one intent, one ruler, one God. They had no thoughts of their own. They were servants to their new master, and joy filled their hearts because they were a chosen people.

The Preacher was pleased. His plans were working. Years of learning how to manipulate emotions in a crowd were paying off. It was almost effortless now. He was a master at playing the audience with the rhythm and pitch and sound of words as they flowed like honey from his mouth. Or hit like bullets when he wanted them to. Then he would comfort the people, and assure them that he knew what they wanted, what they needed, and he could give it to them.

Sometimes it wasn’t so easy. The Preacher would lose his focus for a moment, and project forward into where he knew it would all lead. But it was his focus that was playing the crowd, and the moment he lost it, they would be bewildered until he returned to lead them.

What he said was far less important than how he said it. Standing tall on the platform set in the middle of the Market, he was a beam of dark light. His face hidden inside the cowl of the black cloak he wore, no one in the crowd could have said what he looked like.

But they were always sure when he was near. They knew what he felt like. They knew what he stood for. They knew what he could do, and they loved him for that power. They knew that if they followed him and what he preached, they would be happy forever.

Behind the Preacher stood seven dark columns of men, their faces also hidden so that they too remained anonymous. However, who they were was not a secret. They were the Kai-Via, the Seven. The enforcers.

The Seven scanned the crowd, looking for those who were not swaying in response to the words—looking for the outsiders,the Mages, the ones who hadn’t yet fallen in love with the message.

The Kai-Via’s role as enforcers wasn’t needed as much anymore. The crowds had been tamed. Even this crowd. And when they were finished here, the one true religion would have taken over the planet of Thamon.

Everyone who hadn’t succumbed to the power of the Preacher’s words was being eliminated. They had been banished. Forever.

However, the head of the Kai-Via watched as the Preacher used his words to reinforce and sustain what they had already done, and wondered whose side the Preacher was on. He would be watching.

As the Preacher spoke, the crowd bowed their heads, and fell to their knees in gratitude because everything they wanted was theirs, as long as they followed the God, Aaron.

The wind whipped through the crowd, blowing shawls and cloaks into the air like flags. Many of the converted wore black robes like the Kai-Via, the Seven, but their robes didn’t have hoods. There was no hiding for them. Each face registered in the minds of the seven men scanning the crowd. Looking for those who were too alert. Too interested in things other than the speaker and the words that he spoke.

A sea of black robes was a powerful sight to see, and the Preacher and the Kai-Via reveled in the knowledge that this crowd was theirs as were the thousands of crowds across Thamon. Each crowd full of the young, the old, men, and women, all gathered as one, worshipers of the one God that ruled them all.

The Preacher was the mouthpiece of that one God. He delivered the message. The Preacher gathered them all into the emotions of oneness, togetherness, and sameness. And as his words ebbed and flowed, the crowd roared in approval.

For them, magic was dead. Aaron was the ruler. They were his subjects, and for them life was now glorious. What they had before was gone. All their worries were replaced with certainty. All they had to do was follow their new religion of Aaron-Lem, and all would be well.

Anyone who had resisted the Aaron-Lem doctrines had been killed or rounded up and placed in prisons where everything they ever believed was sucked out of them, and replaced with the laws of the one true religion. Or they had died in protest.

The time of Aaron’s rule was upon them, and they thought they were happy.

At the back of the crowd stood a man and a woman. There was nothing different about them. Their faces registered the same joyful emotions. They swayed in time to the words. They bowed their heads along with everyone else.

But hidden in the folds of their black robes, their fingers touched. They knew something that the Preacher and the Seven did not know, or at least did not want to believe.

Magic was not dead. Aaron was not their God. And they were not alone.

One

Meg stole a look over her shoulder, checking to see if anyone had followed her. The need to find shelter before nightfall was becoming more and more imperative. Night on this planet was doing something to her, something she couldn’t control.

Time was running out. Thamon’s second sun, Trin, was setting, and the night was chasing at her heels. She needed to find the building she was looking for soon while Etar, Thamon’s first sun, still gave her enough light to see.

As Meg ran through the shadows, she told herself that she had to stop worrying. She would get to the building in time, and she would be safe for the night.

However, constantly looking over her shoulder was slowing her down, and she felt like an idiot for being so paranoid. But the habit of being afraid was hard to shake.

Stop it, Meg said to the voice in her head that kept telling her she was in danger, not only from the present but from her past. Someone might find her.

But that was impossible. No one knew where she had gone, and even if they did, they would never find her. Besides, even if they were looking right at her, they wouldn’t know who she was. Because she could be anyone, or anything, any time she wanted to—most of the time.

But that was a secret, and a problem she was going to keep to herself until she could find others like her. Or at least someone that she could trust. In the meantime, she had no intention of shapeshifting unless she had to. It was too dangerous. Because she had made a massive mistake, and there was no one to blame for it but herself.

So, for now, she made herself look like any other inhabitant of the city of Woald. If anyone were paying attention to her, she would be a nondescript woman wearing the standard clothes of the people living on the Islands. Which meant she needed to slow down and look like them, not like someone trying to hide.

Breathe, she told herself. She had been in worse scrapes than this. Well, maybe not.

What had happened was not what she had planned. Running away from home was meant to be an escape to where she could be free. But she had moved too quickly without thinking things through. Not that unusual for her, but back home someone always helped her when she made rash decisions and stupid mistakes. However, when she overheard her parents discuss their plans to move her someplace she wouldn’t be so dangerous to others and herself, she panicked.

There was no way she was going to conform and become a good girl or good shapeshifter. Getting into trouble was too much fun. So that night, while they slept, she ran away. It was surprisingly easy. When you can turn yourself into anything, there is nowhere you can’t go and nothing you can’t do—if you’re careful.

And she had learned to be careful. At least about that. What she wasn’t careful about was where she was going. It hadn’t taken her long to figure out that she had moved too quickly.

By the end of the first week on her own, she had discovered her mistake, but it was too late to do anything about it. Thamon was her new home, and she would have to find a way to like it.

She could have chosen to go to another dimension on Gaia, but instead, she decided to leave the planet altogether. It was a big universe, and she wanted to explore. The only place she didn’t want to go was where her parents were planning to take her, so instead, she talked one of the portal makers into sending her to someplace else. Well, she didn’t talk him into it, she scared him into it by threatening to tell a secret she knew about him.

He had told her he would send her to the perfect place for shapeshifters like her. She believed him. To be fair, he was telling the truth. Because he probably wanted her to go someplace where they controlled people like her, and to a place that she could never leave. She had thought he meant it would be a place where she could be free. What he meant was it was a place where others would be free of people like her. What he had done was banish her to a place that hated people like her.

She supposed she shouldn’t have threatened the portal maker. The sad part was, she didn’t know a secret about him, but then, he didn’t know that.

At first, Meg thought she had arrived in paradise. Although it was only two islands connected with a land bridge, it was beautiful, and much like home with meadows and forests. What made it different were the two suns, Etar and Trin.

Meg spent her first days celebrating her newfound status as a free woman on a beautiful planet. There was no one to tell her what to do. She was independent for the first time in her life. Because she could look like anyone, she fit in where ever she went. Life was easy. She stole food and supplies or sweet-talked the unsuspecting into giving her what she needed or wanted.

And she listened. It was what she began to hear that changed everything. She discovered the reason why the portal maker had sent her here. She could be relatively free, but only if no one suspected what she was. So far, she had been lucky, and she was going to keep it that way.

Trying to keep herself from looking afraid because that would give her away, Meg turned the last corner and found the building she had seen earlier in the day. It looked deserted, a place to settle in and decide what to do.

She couldn’t let herself wish she had never run away. Or think about the fact that she would have been better off staying with her parents and letting them take her where they had planned. It was too late to feel sorry for herself. There was no way to go home. Thamon was her home now, and she was going to make the best of it.

There had to be others like her. She would find them before the wrong people found her. Because what the rulers of Thamon had in mind for people like her didn’t sound like anything she wanted to experience. Luckily, they didn’t know about her, and she was going to keep it that way.

Two

At the first sign of dawn, the problem Meg experienced at night slipped away, and she felt safe enough to leave the building in search of food and information. The Market was Meg’s first stop each morning.

As soon as the faintest beam of light streaked through the sky from Thamon’s first sun, farmers and craftspeople would roll their carts into the Market to set up their booths and stalls. One minute the Market was empty, and the next it would be filled with multiple colorful mini-stores and booths selling almost anything the people of the Islands might want.

All of this set up took place in Etar’s pale blue light. Even though it was one of Thamon’s suns, Etar was far enough away to be not much brighter than the reflected light of the moon on Meg’s home planet Gaia. To Meg, it made the mornings on Thamon as magical as the twilight that she had loved at home.

The first booth that Meg went to every morning served her new favorite drink. It tasted like coffee, but better. Not quite as bitter, but not sweet either. Because it was made from a bean that looked like a coffee bean from back home, Meg wondered if they were related.

The young man working the booth always filled her cup to the brim and gave her at least two slices of the delicious bread that they sold there. Meg never paid, and he never noticed. If he had, he wouldn’t have minded.

Charming people into giving her what she wanted was so easy for Meg, the fun of it had faded long ago. But she didn’t have any money, and she was not prepared to work at a job, so Meg felt that charming or stealing what she needed was her only option.

To get her free morning meal, all she had to do was make herself look a little more like the kind of woman the young man favored. Just enough to catch his eye, but not enough to be too visible to the rest of the people at the Market.

It had taken her only one quick peek inside of his mind to know what he liked. She had stayed inside his head only long enough to get the information she needed. Unless she had to, she never lingered inside anyone’s mind.

Part of it was because Meg tried not to do more magic or manipulation than was necessary to get what she wanted or needed. But there was another reason for her short stays. She had discovered that most minds were so full of junk and bits of nonsense, it felt like stepping into a pile of trash.

However, in spite of not feeling any guilt for the way she got what she wanted, Meg was grateful for what she received. In return, she tried to leave most people feeling better about themselves as a thank you.

Meg smiled at the young man as he passed her the food and drink, and decided what he needed was a companion. If she ran across his match, she promised herself she would introduce them to each other.

As Meg sat at a small table at the edge of the Market enjoying her breakfast, she told herself that it was probably a mistake going to his cart every morning. But she needed something that felt familiar with all the uncertainty of this new world. Meg stayed watching the crowd for a while, but by the time Trin had risen above the horizon, she had slipped away into the crowd of people who had arrived to shop in the Market.

As she walked, she continually tweaked her look enough to disappear, but being careful never to change so much it would be noticeable. It was a delicate balance, and she was always on the lookout for others doing the same thing.

There have to be more people like me, Meg thought. The trouble was, they could be anywhere, or anything. Well, anything that moved. Meg couldn’t turn herself into a tree, or stone. But the lizard sunning himself on the rock could be someone like her. Unlikely though. She had never met another shapeshifter who could be almost anything. Even her parents didn’t have the range that she did, and her sister, Suzanne, could only turn into a dragon. A funny-looking one at that, but still a dragon.

What Meg wanted to do first was find others like herself. She hoped to learn more about what the members of Kai-Via had in mind for Mages and shapeshifters, and how to avoid their detection. All she had learned so far was that it was dangerous to be a Mage or shapeshifter in Thamon. But why? And how dangerous? She decided that she might find out more answers today because the Preacher was arriving that afternoon to speak at a gathering at the Market. Everyone was excited. They had heard that he was mesmerizing.

Meg wasn’t sure that was a good quality, even though she used it to her own advantage all the time.

Just a moment before, she had snitched a new shawl off a cart owned by an old woman by simply manipulating what the woman was seeing. Meg had been admiring the shawl for days, and finally, she couldn’t resist. But seconds later, reason had kicked in, and a newly found caution made her put it back. It was such a beautiful shawl someone might recognize it, and then she would be in trouble.

Besides, she had to admit she had felt sorry for the woman. If she were going to steal, it would have to be from someone who could afford it or deserved it. And of course, too many things going missing would make the spies of the Kai-Via suspicious. That was the last thing she needed.

Instead, she wrapped her plain gray cloak around her and strolled through the Market, listening, and observing, passing the time until the Preacher arrived.

What Meg didn’t notice was someone else was doing the same thing, but their focus was on her.

Three

Wren reluctantly turned away from watching the woman and headed to the daily morning meeting. Roar and Ruth were probably already there waiting for her. If she were too late, they would start to panic, thinking something might have happened to her, and she didn’t want them to go through that.

She knew how that felt. Disappearances happened almost every day. Friends vanishing without a trace. So even though their little group made sure that they held their meetings in one of the deserted homes located on Hetale, Lopel’s sister island, they had become even more cautious. They adjusted their appearances as needed, just in case someone was watching. As watchers themselves, they were all too aware of how easy it was to observe and not be seen.

Wren and her friends had learned that there was no such thing as being overly cautious. More than one member of their group had disappeared since they started holding meetings.

It was possible that someone had tracked them to a meeting, and had told the Kai-Via about them. Of course, multiple other things could have happened, but now, to be safe, every few days they moved to a new meeting place.

This morning they were